Here’s a bit of holiday fun: A Coot Speedrun! Pit your Coot skills against the rest of the world!

I believe that many Coot users are unfamiliar with the ways in which one can get stuff done fast in Coot. So how about a friendly competition to stimulate discussion? Coot users are invited to fix-up a structure using Coot, so that the R-factor from Refmac reaches particular value.

In this first Coot Speedrun Challenge, the structure is the tutorial model and data, the target R-factor is 0.17 and R-free 0.20.

You are allowed to use your own general-purpose scripts, Curlew scripts, custom toolbar buttons and key-bindings, but scripts to solve building problems particular to this structure are not allowed.

You are allowed to pre-open the “Other Modelling Tools” dialog.

So that we can have a “winner” the competition will end shortly after the “2021 CCP4 Study Weekend” - but of course we would be interested in fast times for a while after that.

Post your timings to the “Coot Speedrun Map 1” thread on the mailing list. Or Twitter: #cootspeedrun

You will need to run Refmac from Coot (otherwise the timer script won’t know where to find the refmac log file).

You are allowed to copy the rnasa-1.8-all_refmac1.mtz file into the current directory for easy access - the mtz file can be found in the share/coot/data directory of your Coot binary distribution.

Click on the SpeedRun menu item in the main menubar to open the Speedrun dialog. Keep an eye on the dialog, it will let you know when you have finished.

If has some takers, then I will make another “Map” from different problematic structure and other assessment criteria will be introduced.

The Speedrun script can be found in Curlew or here:

https://www2.mrc-lmb.cam.ac.uk/personal/pemsley/coot/files/speed-run-timer.py